Value of the Network and its Secretariat

Excellence, Efficiency and Impact

The INDEPTH Network, through its Secretariat and its various organs, creates value for all its stakeholders globally. With Member Centres, Working Groups, Funders and Partner Scientists, the Secretariat ensures that excellence, efficiency and impact are all privileged in its approaches and outputs.

The Network boosts member centres and increases their potential for policy impact by strengthening their research capacity, ensuring excellent data management, increasing the global visibility of major health and demographic surveillance system (HDSS) analyses, and helping to secure funding for centre studies.

The Network’s Secretariat works closely with Working Groups to ensure excellence and continuous improvement in scientific research, as well as helping to identify funding and streamlining the process of setting up multi-centre studies.

For Funding Partners, the Network ensures that studies are conducted effectively and efficiently and ensures excellent data harmonisation and management.

The INDEPTH Secretariat creates opportunities for Researchers to access top scientists in low and middle-income countries (LMICs), the best longitudinal data, and the best available health research and demographic platforms to showcase their research. Policy Makers have access to cutting edge research that can provide them with evidenced options from which they can develop sound policies that hold promise to transform the lives of people living in countries with limited resources. The Secretariat has helped to raise more than $60m for multi-centre research.

INDEPTH strengthens research capacity at member centres by organising training programmes, workshops, and regular Scientific Conferences, as well as sponsoring MSc and PhD students and research fellows. Training programmes seek to build excellence in data collection, data analysis, proposal and report writing, and general administration and management. In the last five years, at least 250 scientists have participated in INDEPTH training.

Since its inception, the Secretariat has invested US $1.6 million in strengthening research capacity. This effort has provided the necessary training at a fraction of the cost incurred by centres providing it independently.

At least 500 researchers have participated in workshops, and at least forty have been funded to pursue graduate studies. INDEPTH has funded sixteen research fellows to work at member centres. All these initiatives have improved the technical skills of scientists across the countries with HDSSs.

The INDEPTH Scientific Conference, held every two years, assembles at least 200 scientists from the member centres, funders, peer review publication editors, Scientific Advisors and other stakeholders, to discuss study findings and plan future activities.